


Roche and the Hyper Light Drifter

by Umbreon_ly



Category: Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997), Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: All adjectives just describe Cloud and his abilities from Roches perspective, Cloud is so amazing and hot that Roche quits his job, Introspection of why Roche joined Shina and his dissatisfaction with it, Love at First Sight, M/M, Motorcycle Fighting, Title is also purposefully cheeky and Harry Potter sounding do not question me, Title is nothing to do with the video game of the same name, Which is a bit batshit anyhow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:53:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24714139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbreon_ly/pseuds/Umbreon_ly
Summary: A SOLDIER Third Class and a SOLDIER First Class clash on the road. Roche decides it won't be the last time. He gives chase.
Relationships: Roche/Cloud Strife
Comments: 6
Kudos: 93





	Roche and the Hyper Light Drifter

**Author's Note:**

> After meeting Roche and seeing him be a ballistic weirdo who flirts with you and backstabs his own employers to help you, I couldn't help but like him. Here I am, writing fic about him. I wrote this in one evening, and yes I finished at 3am, but happily open to concrit about it.

-

“What’s that?”

“A SOLDIER.”

He flew by the slow targets in the next breath, parallel, so close to the ground that his bike left flames on the asphalt. The speed demon was there and gone. Cutting down enemies. Moving on.

They were juvenile car thieves, arrogant and sharp-tongued until they’d seen a SOLDIER on the horizon. It stoked their fear. They slowed down. Their spirits withered. So did his own; they were no challenge and no chase.

His sword had split the chassis of their car from the wheel axes. When he drove forward, the stolen car’s wheels went one way, the body of the car and its passengers went another. They crashed dully into the median and the Shinra troops riding motorized snails surrounded them. They no longer needed him.

He went for a drive.

Midgar had thousands of Shinra troopers and at least a couple hundred Shinra thieves at any given second, he just had to find some of them. Maybe some Shinra illegal racers, some bikers of Shinra make and model or some warriors wandering the street for a fight, for or against Shinra. This city was fucking infested with those dangers. Yet almost every day he prowled and paced and was unsatisfied.

Roche returned to the barracks before dawn with his bike dented and a little blood on his sleeves. Not particularly tired.

“Who goes there?” said a gate guard, probably new and uninitiated.

“A SOLDIER,” said a second, a little less green, tensing up.

“Ugh. Just let him through,” said the one that actually recognized him.

The gate guards didn’t scan his ID. Roche grinned and saluted the three of them as he drove lazily past. Only the newbie saluted back, the second and third just stared. The third one was probably in the popular clique of collateral damage. A lot of lesser troopers had been hit in the fact with some debris when Roche was nearby on the road, or just been knocked off their bikes or out of their vehicles. It had been a couple of years since he’d felt sorry for things like that.

On the base, some troopers looked up as a SOLDIER went by, because they were a rare and proud group. Most of them scowled in his direction. All of them averted their walking path or gave him a wide berth as he came close. Roche didn’t acknowledge or really see any of them. He parked his bike in its special garage and preened her till the sun was long up and the dent was gone from her cowl.

When a call from his higher-ups came, he ignored it. He pressed the Decline button and laughed the second time. On the third call he laughed again, left the garage and went for a drive again, now in daylight. Faster. He thought about just throwing the damn thing away. Maybe over an overpass.

It was just a pity, a real sad mess, that he joined the military for adventure and for having some fucking meaning in life and they gave him superpowers and even a salary, but nothing to use either of those things on. The way of SOLDIER was to march and stop and start when Shinra told you to, but after making him one of those elite members, they found out too late that he didn’t obey commands as well as hoped. Once he threw the phone away, they’d probably give him a new label beyond _danger to fellow troops_ or _financial liability,_ and it would be _deceased._

It left his future more unknown than ever. Just him and his motorcycle and the scream of the engine, the path to anywhere.

That day, he kept his phone on him. He went to Wesley’s garage in Sector 7 and inspected the day’s customers. He took a nap on a couch in the owner’s office.

_In his dreams a white-hot warrior rocketed past him in a neon-streaked night. He chased it. He danced with it in battle. It crushed the engine of his motorcycle in one blow. His heart beat so strongly it hurt. His body shuddered when it touched him. He screamed in delight._

_He screamed at it:_ Dance with me!

Roche woke up on that couch as though into another dream: heart racing and limbs twitching, body suffused with delight from the hardest race. His dreams were more interesting than most of the stupid shit he ever had to do with Shinra. Nothing so interesting as that was happening at his job or in this half-dead garage. But it made him smile.

That afternoon, Wesley asked him how the work with Shinra was going, since his nephew was a SOLDIER fan and wanted to join up, too. Roche told him that it wasn’t even worth it. Shinra would suck you dry or let you die. Or both. 

That evening, they called him again and he answered with a groan. The dispatcher didn’t even care about his attitude, just shouted at him to head to the Corkscrew Tunnel and wait for an incoming hostile.

That same hour, he showed up as commanded and parked against a wall and waited.

The hostile came; Roche didn’t realize that a piece of him was picked up and pulled along as the stranger sped by. They were fast. He hopped onto his red and gave chase.

With a shout he veered his bike upward and rode horizontally along the wall, seeing his prey ahead and below. There was a passenger on the first bike who looked over her shoulder at him and there was the familiar gasp of surprise and apprehension.

“Who’s that?”

“A SOLDIER,” said the rider, while Roche laughed. The hostiles didn’t slow down or cower in fear. The leader of the pack of four was glaring at him, unblinking and ready.

He landed on the ground, already enjoying the chase that evening, which had suddenly turned so fine.

That was the day he laid eyes on him.

“Well, HELLO—”

He didn’t answer at first. He and his friends rode on some rusted bikes that were at least a decade old but still had oil-slick movement speed. He was blonde, heavy locks hardly even moved by the wind. He frowned. He was cute.

“You talkin’ to me?”

They were speeding enough that he was having fun. The sight of the huge sword on a slim man excited him with its possibilities. One of the bright-light warriors he always wanted to find. Most incredible of all, he wore the uniform of a SOLDIER, a Second or even First. It made the hairs on his neck stand on end.

“I most certainly am.”

The brunette passenger scowled and the two male followers trailed behind, knowing they weren’t a part of this challenge. But the real rider met his eyes. When Roche felled the bridge over their heads, the real rider among them sped through the falling concrete and dust. He wasn’t fazed. He had his sword outstretched and ready. Roche was ready.

He whirled around in the middle of the road and flung out materia-laced arcs of lightning. He summoned lightning strikes to pin the old bike where it was in the road and they were dodged. He braked so the enemy’s bike would tear ahead of his and lashed out when they passed, but the stranger blocked his sword with his own. Roche’s motorcycle wobbled in the road, unsteady now. It struck him just then that this SOLDIER, whoever he was, combatively and literally outclassed him.

Could it be he really was a First? There were only a few dozen Firsts the world over. It was a small likelihood that he’d never heard of this one. It was as though he hadn’t actually come out of the hateful meatpacking factory that was Shinra, but out of a dream and here onto his road.

His breath was coming in uneven pants. The blond stranger looked back over his shoulder, sword held perilously close to the ground, like he cared nothing for the danger of it scraping the asphalt. Roche chuckled and sped up to catch him.

As the gap between them was closing, the stranger braked, then whirled. The front-left section of his bike struck Roche’s motorcycle as it passed like a hard kick to the calf. Bits of his bike's caliper and rotor flicked away behind his legs and fell into the road. It left the bike wobbling from the impact and his jaw half-open from the fact that there had been an impact at all. The stranger had rammed him. The stranger had met his every move so far. It suffused him with awe. 

He sped up and went past him again, looking back at him with blue eyes striking as neon. A thin, white trail of fire flew from his engine thruster as he got further and further ahead. 

_‘Holy god.’_

Roche chased him.

He got close and intimate, keeping the swordplay tight. He was close enough to see into the blue eyes and see the open-mouthed scowl the rider regarded him with. The stranger even kicked out at his bike to try and knock him off, playing dirty. It made him laugh. He turned backwards, rode towards him like two jousting stallions, and the stroke of his sword was rebuffed yet again.

“Had enough?”

Holy god, he’d dreamed about a dance like this. About this very dance between them here and now. 

“Don’t be absurd—"

Before he knew it, the SOLDIER pulled away on his bike, but came back—he landed a jump onto his red bike’s engine.

 _‘You gonna kill me and get me free of Shinra?’_ he wondered nonsensically while the wild man was in the air.

The huge sword tore into the metal covering over the engine. Roche had to shield his eyes from the sparks and sudden, little tongues of fire that spurted up through the tear. The stranger spent less than five seconds standing on his bike before he leaped away and was safely on his own vehicle again. In less than five seconds, he’d been soundly defeated.

For five more seconds, he sat not looking at the little flames coming out of his engine or even really at the road, but at the still-burning brand of this man on his mind. He could not stop smiling.

How elegant. How aggressive and reckless as he drove. How captivating was that scowling, pouting face and its moonlike eyes. His expression was asking _had enough_ again, waiting for a mirroring, wordless answer. 

No. Never. Not of this. Nothing like this—this dream coming to life. 

He looked up at the man, now riding alongside him, taunting him with that perfectly matched and unbothered speed. Roche looked at him and felt his fate locking to him. There was a surety in him that hadn’t existed seconds before, that this dance wasn’t over. He knew for certain this man wouldn’t be a stranger for long.

There would be a next time. He asked for that next time to be just between the two of them. No passengers, no tagalongs. The stranger said _maybe,_ and pouted again. His face was suited for pouting. He was entirely alluring. He was making Roche’s entire body shudder with a touch of pleasure and excitement.

“What’s your name?” Roche asked.

The SOLDIER had seen that admiring assessment in his eyes. It made his hackles raise. He replied, “None of your damn business,” and even his passenger girl looked a bit shocked.

“Maybe when I take the victory next time, you’ll tell me?” he offered instead.

“I don’t see that happening next time. Or ever.”

“There’ll be a next time. Be ready for me.”

The stranger saw something of this growing desire in his voice, or in his face, or both. His eyes became a little wide. It only pulled Roche in further. Their bikes were running daringly close, the handlebars less than a foot from touching.

Roche reached over and touched his cheek. Even under the glove, it was smooth and beautiful, untouched by this battle. “I’ll see you then, angel,” he said.

The second his touch pulled away from that cheek, the SOLDIER sped ahead and left Roche and his flaming engine behind. The tagalong pair followed in his wake. Ahead, the angel rode with white fire flaring from his old bike and that blond hair swept lovingly by the wind.

 _‘_ I _shall be the one to touch it lovingly,’_ he thought while the engine fires waved in front of his face. As soon as the thought came to his mind, it was a sure fact. _‘I’ll find you again for a second dance. And your name. And more.’_

He didn’t expect his request for a name to actually be denied. But he hadn’t expected to be defeated while riding, while on a common road he knew well, to have discovered an unknown SOLDIER, or to have fallen in love with a creature from his dreams.

Roche left the exposed portion of the Corkscrew Tunnel laughing. Filled with uplifting fire and joy. He rode up the wall of the tunnel and into Sector 7 traffic and out of it. On his way to the nearest repair shop, his phone started ringing. A fellow Third Class who technically was his boss was calling him to do more marching and jumping for Shinra. But there were greater prizes in life than following Shinra. And the blue-eyed angel had chosen not to kill him, but still freed him. He must return that gift. 

Roche held the ringing phone in one hand and grinned at it before throwing it over the side of an overpass.

**Author's Note:**

> Partially inspired by Rellanka's little Roche/Cloud ficlet wherein Roche thinks that he, a speed demon, should court himself an angel: [Lets Dance Forevermore](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24103054)
> 
> May follow up with another chapter or two encompassing the second Roche encounter and his attempts to either worm his way into Cloud's group, or actually be invited in, or some other non-canon incidents where he just flirts and bothers Cloud a lot. I like the first half's writing overall better than the second half, since I was getting tired and losing my writing brain powers after 2am. But before you go, here are some ROCHE FACTS AND THINGS: 
> 
> 1) Roche is introduced with a shot of him/his bike in the air with fire behind them while Jessie says "Who's that?" and Cloud grimly answers "A SOLDIER." I thought this was an impressive shot that displays what SOLDIERS are to an uninitiated audience: intimidating, violent freaks. Decided to use that brief exchange a couple of times in this fic, to illustrate how various people (strangers, Shinra soldiers and Cloud's gang) view him too, by having them each say it a little differently. I M a smartt writur. 
> 
> 2) The English VA for Roche is an FF fan who cosplayed Sephiroth in high school and says that Roche is his favorite character that he ever voiced.
> 
> 2.5, NEW!) He also says that (while he obviously doesn't get to decide the canon) he likes to think Roche's bike is named Cherrybomb and Roche himself is pansexual 
> 
> 3) After defeating Roche in the Corkscrew Tunnel, you go to Jessie's house and 1-2 hours pass in-game and irl for the player before Roche shows up again. That means he left after being defeated, got his bike fixed and LITERALLY CAME RIGHT BACK, I think this is so funny. 
> 
> 4) When casting Assess on Roche, the infobox notes that he is ostracized by others due to his lack of regard for other people's safety. So he's unpopular even among his own peers. 
> 
> 5) In the German dub for FF7R, his name is changed to Locche and pronounced like "LOH-cheh".


End file.
